Real Estate Investing/Wholesaling is a numbers game, but what would you rather do? Reach 10K leads to get 1 deal, or 1K?
You’d probably say “1K, of course.” But how do you get there? It all starts with good data. Even if your marketing is excellent, and your selling skills are outstanding, if you have bad data, you will waste time and money going after leads that will never become deals. You won’t even be able to reach them.
At GoForClose, we have an entire team focusing on data – compiling, analyzing, and adding it to our machine learning, lead scoring, quality checking, and running it through our multi-tiered skip tracing tools.
We apply it daily to our campaigns to target sellers who are segmented by their motivation to sell and lead scoring results. As methods of data acquisition continue to evolve, we keep up with these to gather the best data to find motivated seller leads and improve campaign success over short- and long-term periods of time.
Without data, any and all marketing efforts you make to reach your audiences go up the river unnoticed. So let’s talk about data.
What Do We Mean When We Say “Data?”
In Real Estate Investing, “data” means motivated homeowner lists, verified and run through lead scoring models to determine how likely and how soon owners will sell, based on various distress factors. What is a distress factor? It’s a reason that motivates the owner to need to sell, which is different than wanting to sell, as the latter will most likely just list it. Let’s dive into this deeper.
One List For All or A Winning List for One
One of the most common mistakes real estate investors make is buying lists from providers who sell to everyone. PropStream, ListSource, PropertyRadar, and the like have “great lists”, but they sell these to hundreds of investors (at a cheap price no less), so the lists are no longer valuable.
GoForClose builds custom lists, unmatched in the industry, that are market specific. Our lists are built by data researchers and web scraping tools that extract data from unique sources that are public but not often accessed. These sources include arrest records, obituaries, code violations, water shutoffs, and much more. The reality is that if you tried to do it yourself, including cross-referencing and cleaning the data, it would take you weeks to get the same number of homeowners we supply on a weekly basis.
A lot of time, effort, and expertise goes into creating those lists, but once they’re done, they give you the competitive edge. This is why we are market exclusive, meaning only one investor per market gets our high quality homeowner list – it’s first come, first serve. This way, unlike our providers that sell their lists to thousands of investors, only you have access to your market’s data list, putting the odds in your favor.
Lead Scoring To Identify The Leads That Matter
In a nutshell, lead scoring is a methodology to identify those leads who are most likely ready to sell and soon. There are at least 92 different lists to target, and each list is a different motivation.
So how does the lead scoring model determine which leads are the priority? Our machine learning evaluates, based on historical data, who has sold in the area and who sold to a wholesaler or investor, and why, and uses a point system to evaluate those types of sellers who are most likely to sell over others. For example, an inherited property is more likely to sell if it has a lien on it, or a rental is more likely to sell if its tenants filed for bankruptcy and were granted an automatic stay.
Lead scoring provides vital information to know who to target first and how to optimize marketing efforts. Leads who have a lower score today may get added points later, as more distress factors appear. For example, a pre-foreclosure that gets multiple utility shutoffs added to its record and that’s moving closer to its estimated foreclosure date will have more points for each added factor.
It’s All About Quality when Verifying Names, Numbers, and Addresses
When speaking of lists and data, we have to also mention skip tracing. It’s an essential step that’s included when you subscribe to our exclusive data. But let’s say your market is taken, or you decide to get the data yourself. How do you verify names, numbers, and addresses?
Here’s what many skip tracing providers will NOT tell you: matches or hits do NOT equal accuracy. Many well-known skip tracers mention up to 98% matching rates, but when you look at their accuracy, at best they are around 65%, and many far far less than that, as in less than half of 65%.
You can search for homeowner information providers and purchase matches for as cheap as half a penny. But are you going to test those numbers to assess accuracy? And what do you do if the numbers are wrong? You could spend a lot of time hunting down contacts and either come up empty or miss a sale.
This is when a cheap service becomes expensive, as you spend your time and marketing dollars trying to reach homeowners who you don’t even have the correct information for. And who knows? One of them could have been a deal waiting to happen, but you never got to talk with them.
GoForClose uses multi-tiered skip tracing tools to find and verify names and contacts. We test millions of numbers to determine who the best providers are, as well as the second best, third best and so on, based on cold calls and texts. If at first we don’t succeed, we skip trace again through those subsequent sources.
There’s no less than 200 different skip tracing providers, and we test them all to take out the guesswork as to who’s the best for the best price per contact. Beyond matching numbers, we aim for accuracy, using additional sources like USPS Verification and litigation scrubbers to verify information and ensure we can reach the homeowner.
GoForClose Is Big On Data for Your Real Estate Investing Success
Data is a vital element of your marketing strategy, and your real estate success depends on it. Bad data means wasted time, wasted dollars, and you lose leads and opportunities for closing deals. But worry not; we got you.
Our data team gathers data, builds the motivated homeowner list, and implements the multi-tiered skip tracing to your account, and our marketing team uses that data to launch cross-channel campaigns, while your dedicated Inside Sales Associate (ISA) live answers lead replies and offer requests via texts, emails, and calls, and also reaches out to leads through cold calling, to prequalify them, before scheduling appointments on your calendar. This way, you can focus your time and efforts on acquisition and closing deals.
If you have questions or are curious to know more, request a free consultation below.
Wayne Hudson
Wayne Hudson has a background in sales and real estate - but with a passion for economics. He uses his knowledge of economics and real estate to help clients think strategically and make decisions to optimize their outcome.
As the company's business developer, Wayne works to help GoForClose grow.
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Wayne Hudsonhttps://www.goforclose.com/knowledge-base/author/opsgoforclose-com/
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Wayne Hudsonhttps://www.goforclose.com/knowledge-base/author/opsgoforclose-com/
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Wayne Hudsonhttps://www.goforclose.com/knowledge-base/author/opsgoforclose-com/
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Wayne Hudsonhttps://www.goforclose.com/knowledge-base/author/opsgoforclose-com/
